The Messy Meanings of “Masses”
Abstract Language, Antonio Gramsci, and What Makes Political Writing Work
Political writing is full of $&!#
Okay, lemme back up. What I mean is, everyday English isn’t a very good medium for capturing political truths. Politics is social organizing, and political truths describe the flow of sentiment through social networks. There are no words for this type of change.
Commentary makes do, using group labels — demographics, economic indicators, regional generalizations, party membership — to gesture toward networky facts.
It always fails. Even brilliant writers fail.
When they succeed, it’s by anchoring vague terms to real social context. To specific people, to the struggles of right now. Consider Antonio Gramsci, a genuine luminary of social and political thought, with an exceptional gift for turn of phrase and extraordinary capacity for high-level abstract thinking. For all his gifts, Gramsci did a terrible job turning that high-level thinking into the kinds of claims that can be tested, explored, and understood. Not just scientifically but through everyday experience or casual examination. He did, however, achieve a sort of visceral force in his writing.
I want to explore how he did that, by grappling with this question:
Who are “the masses”?
This phrase, ubiquitous in socialist writings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and still put to serious use today, conveys thunderclouds of meaning: Vast implications heaped one atop another, shifting and surmounting as currents alter course, bursting with connotation, and so goddam gauzy and vague you could spend a lifetime trying to find just one single example out in the actual world.
Caveat: I’m not a political writer.
This isn’t socialist exegesis. Our question here is limited to usage and semantics. This particular piece of language offers an illuminating example of how abstract terms convey many meanings at once, and how skilled writers rely implication to perform rhetorical, persuasive functions.
Okay. Gramsci.
Gramsci’s Masses
Let’s start with Gramsci’s article “The parties and the masses,” published in L’Ordine Nuovo, September, 1921:
“The masses don’t exist politically, if they are not framed in political parties: the mutations of opinion which are verified through the masses under the pressure of the determined economic forces are interpreted by parties which first divide by tendency, and than divide in a multiplicity of new organic parties: through this process of disarticulation, neoassociation and fusion between homogenates, is revealed a more profound and intimate process of the decomposition of democratic society for the definite diversion of classes in a struggle for the conservation or the conquest of the power of the State and its power on the functions of production.”
Got it? The masses are a sort of embryonic body politic — the pool of people from which political organizations can attract members.
Now, here are the beautiful and highly effective opening lines to “Men of Flesh and Blood,” published in L’Ordine Nuovo in May of 1921, a time of war and tumult.
“The workers of Fiat have returned to their jobs. Betrayal? Denial of revolutionary ideals? The workers of Fiat are men of flesh and blood. They resisted for a month. They knew how to fight and resist, not only for themselves, not only for the rest of the working masses of Turin, but for the entire Italian working class.
They resisted for a month. They were physically worn out because, for many weeks and months, their salaries were reduced and were no longer sufficient to sustain their families, and yet they resisted for a month. They were completely isolated from the nation, immersed in a general atmosphere of weariness, indifference, hostility, and yet they resisted for a month.”
The “working masses” here picks out a group of people that includes Turin’s striking revolutionaries but also a bunch of other people who opted not to participate — and yet share basic circumstances of class, employment, legal standing, material conditions, etc.
Hold that uses of “masses” in your head for a sec. Here’s another, from “Newspapers and the Workers” (Avanti!, December, 1916):
“Above all, the worker must resolutely reject any solidarity with a bourgeois newspaper…[Consider] all the facts that the bourgeois newspapers either keep quiet about, or travesty, or falsify in order to mislead, delude or maintain in ignorance the laboring public. Despite this, the culpable acquiescence of the worker to the bourgeois newspapers is limitless. We have to react against this and recall the worker to the correct evaluation of reality. We have to say and repeat that the pennies tossed there distractedly into the hands of the newsboy are projectiles granted to a bourgeois newspaper, which will hurl it, at the opportune moment, against the working masses.”
In this passage “the masses” is just the plural of “worker,” itself clearly an abstract term with multiple overlapping meanings.
Get Matthew Isaac Harvey’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Now consider “Neither Fascism nor Liberalism: Sovietism!” (L’Unità, December, 1924 — two years after the formation of the USSR). It opens,
“In the political crisis of the liquidation of fascism the opposition bloc increasingly appears to be a factor of a secondary order. Its heterogeneous social composition, its hesitations, and its aversion for a struggle of the popular masses against the Fascist regime reduce its actions to a journalistic campaign and parliamentary intrigues, which impotently run up against the armed militia of the Fascist party.”
And a few paragraphs later,
“The essential task of our party consists in having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia. When these essential truths will have penetrated the spirit of the working and peasant masses by means of our tireless propaganda the workers of the factories and the fields, of whatever party, will understand the need to construct Worker and Peasant Committees for the defense of their class interests and for the struggle against fascism.”
This is essentially a rallying cry, an us-vs-them socialists-vs-fascists sort of article, where “the mass of workers and peasants” become a united force in opposition to “the fascist militia.”
One Word, Many Meanings, None Determinate
Okay, so: Who are the masses? Most basically, the term shares some of its meaning with phrases like “the American people” or “Britons”: catch-all descriptions for a national population that political movements, parties, and leaders try to influence and organize.
But it also carries distinctively Marxist meanings, referring to the base, not the superstructure; to the working class or “laboring public” and not to the the bourgeoisie and their petite cousins, etc.
It also clearly has a moral meaning: Newspapers that promulgate lies are the enemies of the masses, Fascists are the enemies of the masses; when revolutionaries resist in Turin, it is on behalf of the masses.
I think the term also has to be read as Gramsci making a factual claim about numbers — that this group of people is much more numerous than the various groups against which they are set in opposition (capitalists, bourgeoisie, fascists, etc.).
For Gramsci, “masses” also has a positive meaning of agency and subjectivity, as he follows Marx in seeing the working class as valiant and valuable, strongly rejecting the meaning of “unruly crowd” — think Aristotle’s “mob rule” or Hegel’s “formless mass.” (For more detailed comparison, I recommend this brilliant post over on BoasBlogs.)
So, in Gramsci’s writings over this period of just a few years, “the masses” means: (1) everybody, (2) the working class but not the lower middle class, (3) participants in a series of strikes and uprisings, (4) the majority of the population of the USSR, (5) the engine of political change in general and (6) the arbiter of political legitimacy. I think that he also intends it to mean (7) someone the reader aspires to help or fight for, and (8) the people around them, as they sit on tram or wagon or bench and read the latest pamphlet.
Here’s my question: Why not say something more specific?
Demography was already practiced in the ancient world (attested at least in India, China, and Greece) and was rapidly growing into a mature science even as Gramsci was greasing his rhetorical wheels. The Russian Empire conducted a census in 1897. The USSR conducted its first full census in 1926. Thinkers of Gramsci’s era had access to clearer, plainer, more precise language. Why not use it?
The answer, I think, is simple: Gramsci doesn’t want to say something more specific or concrete. These articles aren’t scholarly, nor are they technical, nor do they reflect the work of inquiry. They are advice. Gramsci is, in these particular passages, a political pundit in the modern sense: Using just a few paragraphs, he tries to describe very rapid and turbulent political changes and exhort his allies to take certain political actions.
To do this, he needs terms that do a lot of work at once. The multiple meanings are deliberate. He uses “the masses” to gesture toward solidarity and courage and to let sympathetic readers interpret his phrases in the most favorable way. When he writes, “only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism,” that’s not strategic claim with a specific meaning. He means, very roughly:
- Working people are really important to our political party
- We need to be actively preparing for armed conflict by recruiting loyal party members
- Our cause is fundamentally just…
- …and thus the majority of our nation’s populace IS on our side. In some sense.
“The masses” conveys, all at once: potential for growth, the fundamental rightness of socialism (compare to “working Americans,” etc.), a broad wave of support (compare “the silent majority”), the necessity of action, and various other traits like physical strength (“workers”) and party loyalty (“solidarity”).
MAGAs, Wine Moms, ANTIFA, and The Groups
Most pundits are not Antonio Gramsci. They pack a lot less meaning — or less coherent meaning — into their rhetoric.
Gramsci’s writing rings with power because the many meanings of his vague terms align. They pull the reader’s attention toward a shared, consistent understanding of the world, one where organized labor was right then using strikes, protests, and what we now call “direct action” as part of an urgent battle for certain specific outcomes — higher pay for factory jobs, national independence. His language is vague only to a modern reader: In Turin, in May, 1921, “the masses” referred to like 50,000 specific individuals. They knew who they were, and they knew he was on their side.,
Most of our pundits spend their time on horse-race commentary; terms like “everyday people” or “average American” have only one meaning: Opposition to an ideological Other, shaded by context.
This is not a problem with our words. It’s a problem with our politics. Political movements ungrounded from specific material change have little around which to organize. Contrast the evocative poverty of “liberal base,” gesturing only toward party alignment and voting consistency, with the richness and clarity of “the 99%,” which gestures toward income, numerousness, shared cause across party, belief in wealth taxes, antagonism toward specific institutions, and opposition to capital in a Marxist sense, repackaged for a new age.
(David Graeber, who helped coin that term, was absolutely a Gramsci of his day.)
Abstract language, well-used, aligns overlapping fields of implication and connotation to add clarity rather than remove it. And because it relies so heavily on unspoken context, it can only be fully understood within the ongoing social organizing it aims to affect.
Some of our current terms are fairly precise — “YIMBY,” maybe, or “environmentalist.” But these terms point toward issues without people; they remain ungrounded in social organizing.
Other terms — “reactionary centrist,” “groyper” — have some specificity to them but remain anchored in the anti-materialist, team-based, color-coded distraction that is the logic of American politics. Most, including those in the section header, are just insults or labels for online communities.
Good political language is concrete, even when it’s abstract. Pointed, even when it’s vague. Think material, think people, think laws, and the words will come.
